A Calculator To Tell You How Many Weeks (Or Months, Or Years) You've Spent Watching TV
Wednesday, April 02, 2014 - 12:18 PM
Bryan Cranston (left) as Walter White, a
meth-cooking high school chemistry teacher with terminal lung cancer,
alongside his former student Jesse Pinkman (Aaron Paul, right) in Breaking Bad.
(AMC)
Oh dear. Designer Alex Cican has created a tool called tiii.me. It's
simple enough. You plug in the TV shows you watch and how many seasons
of them you've caught, and it tells you how much of your life you've
spent watching TV.
I thought I was emotionally prepared for this, but I'm not. I
threw in just three of those Critically Acclaimed HBO Shows (that I,
embarassingly, feel proud of having watched) and tiii.me spit back a
verdict: more than one week, gone, irrevocably.
This may seem obvious to you - that the time you spend consuming media could have been spent doing something else -- but seeing it there, plain and actuarial, feels bleaker. It's not that I don't think TV is a worthwhile thing, or that I'd unwatch those shows. It's just that the numbers, when you add them up, start to feel staggering.
One of my recurring daymares is that at the end of your life, you're given Your Stats. How many hours, total, you spent waiting for your computer to load. Your total number of typos. An alphabetized index of all the people whose feelings you hurt without being aware of it at all. Most of those things are incalculable, thankfully. This website, unfortunately, reminds you that there are stats you can get right now, if you'd like.
This may seem obvious to you - that the time you spend consuming media could have been spent doing something else -- but seeing it there, plain and actuarial, feels bleaker. It's not that I don't think TV is a worthwhile thing, or that I'd unwatch those shows. It's just that the numbers, when you add them up, start to feel staggering.
One of my recurring daymares is that at the end of your life, you're given Your Stats. How many hours, total, you spent waiting for your computer to load. Your total number of typos. An alphabetized index of all the people whose feelings you hurt without being aware of it at all. Most of those things are incalculable, thankfully. This website, unfortunately, reminds you that there are stats you can get right now, if you'd like.
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PJ Vogt
PJ Vogt is on Twitter here. If you'd like to subscribe to TLDR's short weekly podcast, please go here.
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